Floyd Mayweather faces off with Manny Pacquiao at the start of a press conference in Los Angeles. Mayweather will be fighting Pacquiao May 2nd at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas. (Photo by Gene Blevins/LA Daily News)

Sixty reporters were given the opportunity to interview Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao in a conference room inside Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles on Wednesday. Another 600 or so waited outside for the news conference promoting their May 2 welterweight title-unification fight at MGM Grand in Las Vegas to begin.

The red carpet was even rolled out, Hollywood-style.

The bout that will be distributed on the pay-per-view arms of HBO and Showtime is that big. It will be shocking if it doesn’t break all pay-per-view and live-gate records.

Pay-per-view figures to cost between $90 and $100. A limited number of tickets ranging from $1,500 to $7,500 will go on sale to the public.

The boxing world waited more than five years for these two to get together. Mayweather likened it to another monster fight that took place when he was a 10-year-old amateur boxer.

“I always thought that when Hagler and Leonard fought one another in a super fight, I thought there would never be another fight that’s bigger than that particular fight,” Mayweather, 38, said. “But I kept my fingers crossed and here we are today.”

For example, Pacquiao has of late done quite a bit of his training for fights in his native Philippines. He asked his trainer, Freddie Roach, if he could do all of his training for this fight at Roach’s gym in Hollywood because it’s already so “crazy” in the Philippines.

How crazy?

“All of the Filipino people are going to watch this fight,” Pacquiao said. “I’m paying people to take video in the whole country and interview people and take video in the streets, what the people’s reaction is and what they’re doing the day of the fight.”

All of the alleged reasons why this fight took so long to be made have now been rendered unimportant. It’s going to happen, and Mayweather said a big reason why was the chance meeting he had with Pacquiao when both attended a Miami Heat basketball in Miami on Jan. 27. They spoke at halftime, then later in Pacquiao’s hotel suite.

“I think that us meeting after the Miami Heat basketball game, us sitting down one-on-one in his hotel room, communicating and talking (about) why we should make this fight happen, I feel that’s the reason why this fight’s happening,” Mayweather said.

Pacquiao recalled that Mayweather did most of the talking.

“Of course, I didn’t say a lot of words because I didn’t want to say a big mistake,” Pacquiao, 36, said. “And he said he’s the A side and I’m the B side, so I accepted that.”

That means Mayweather will get 60 percent of the monetary pie, Pacquiao 40. How big that pie becomes will depend a lot on money drawn from pay-per-view upside. But Mayweather said he expects to make “nine figures in 36 minutes.”

Whatever Pacquiao (57-5-2, 38 KOs) ends up making is seemingly less vital to him than the fight actually taking place.

“This fight is very important in boxing history,” Pacquiao said. “We don’t want to leave a question mark in the minds of the fans.”

Mayweather is 47-0 with 26 knockouts. He’s already an all-time great. But he wants a victory here more than he has ever wanted one.

“This is a fight the world can’t miss,” Mayweather said. “This is an unbelievable matchup, action-packed fight. I’m in the gym working right now, dedicating myself to the sport, pushing myself to the limit because I’ve never wanted to win a fight so bad in my life.

“And I’m pretty sure he’s going to push himself to the limit because he wants to wants to win just the same way I want to win.”

The respective trainers – Floyd Mayweather Sr. and Freddie Roach – did most of the trash-talking Wednesday. The elder Mayweather was caught outside of Nokia before the fighter interviews. He reacted to those who had been saying his son was afraid to fight Pacquiao.

“I actually think Floyd had a better chance of beating Manny five years ago than he does now because his legs are a little bit shot and he’s slowed down a little bit and I think we can take advantage of that,” Roach said.

“He says he plans to exchange with fighters more to make the fights more friendly (to fans) and so forth. I think that’s (expletive) because he doesn’t care about the fans at all. He has to exchange more now because his legs won’t take him out of the way.”

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